Beryl User Interface for Linux Reviewed

techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."

Comments

0 results found for "berly"

[TodMinuit]

Did you mean "beryl"? Seriously, you got it right in the title but not in the blurb.

And you can find the project here. Has web 2.0 killed direct-linking? Let me write a blog post and submit to Slashdot to find out.

Re:0 results found for "berly"

[FreeGamer]

Not only that, but this is a review of a project that is being merged back into the original; Compiz. What's the point in running a story about something that is basically going to disappear? A compiz article would be much more appropriate since that is even installed on a default Ubuntu installation these days. Beryl is just the name for a now-dead fork.

What is being reviewed here?

[jrumney]

TFA is slashdotted already, but from the summary I can't tell if he's reviewing Beryl, the unstable fork of Compiz 3D window manager, which is itself unstable and not enabled by default in the latest Ubuntu and most other distros, or the recently released Ubuntu 7.04, AKA Feisty Fawn.

Re:What is being reviewed here?

[grcumb]

Practically everyone I know is running Beryl as their WM. I'm staring at it right now as I type. I couldn't however for a moment, and nor would any of my colleagues, suggest that it is 'stable'.

Indeed. I find myself asking why someone would expect anything at all from a 0.2.0 rc3 release - the version of Beryl currently available on Feisty.

I think it's a good time to evaluate Beryl/Compiz features, and to comment on their usability and appeal. Performance, compatibility and stability are not IMO relevant, because this is a pre-beta experimental release aimed directly at geeks interested in playing on the bleeding edge.

My personal take on the UI elements that Beryl offers is that it's a promising package. The improvements since version 0.1 are significant, especially in terms of integration and performance. They bode well for the quality of the final product.

But most interesting of all are the GUI elements. There are numerous visual tricks in use that make using it much much more pleasant than Windows/GNOME/KDE. In the absence of an actual useful review, here's my quick take on some aspects of it:

• The smooth fade-in and fade-out when windows and menus are opened and closed is a good deal less alarming for people who aren't confident at the computer. I find it quite soothing, too.
• For as long as I've been using X windows, I've tried to come to terms with virtual desktops. My big hang-up is that out of sight means out of mind. Regardless of those tiny inconised displays of desktop contents that many desktop managers have, I just couldn't visualise what was there, and as a result, found it difficult to use them. But the three-dimensional desktop switching has given me a metaphor I can 'see'. Compiz treats each of the virtual desktops as one face on the exterior of a cube, so switching desktops is as intuitive as turning your head to view what's on the wall beside you, or spinning a card rack, if you like. Suddenly I'm using three desktops where two was too many before.
• Push the mouse cursor to the top right corner and you get a Mac-like display of all the windows nicely arranged against a muted background. It's a straight rip-off from another platform, but that's one of the things that Linux sometimes does very well.
• The new ALT-TAB switching clearly has merit. Again, the background recedes and is muted while the candidate windows step to the foreground one by one. The images are 'live' representations of each window, so if, for example, you have multiple browser windows open, you can flip to the one with the website you're looking for without trying to decipher the title bar text.
• The 'wobbly window' effect, in which a window takes on a Jello-like consistency when moved, really seems like silly geek eye candy at first. Its only purpose seemed to be to encourage me to buy a proper graphics card. Then I went back to GNOME/Metacity and found that I didn't like the rigid windows at all any more. They're not nearly as welcoming. YMMV, but I find them more intuitive, in the sense that they feel more like paper.
• BUT: Imbuing min/maximising windows with the same physical dynamics as the surface tension of water, so that windows SNAP-BOINGGG! into their new size is just plain weird. The effects are straight out of a Chuck Jones animated short - fine for Saturday mornings, but.... I'm definitely turning off that feature.
• Window borders of background apps become partially transparent when there's no activity in them, opaque when there is. Interesting way of giving visual cues when multi-tasking. I'll wait to see how they behave with a proper graphics adapter before I make a decision about this feature. I've got a multi-gigabyte rsync running in a console at the moment, and it's pulsing faintly in behind this edit window as it sticks on larger files, then moves on. Right now, the transition is smooth enough not be be distracting, but that might be a side-effect of

Re:Beta Software

[TheSciBoy]

Actually...

Beta has been abused a lot in software firms across the board. This is how it is, and should be:
Alpha release, is a software release that essentially works, but lacks some functionality that is planned for final release. It is released to a limited set of users (or maybe just in the firm that created the software) for ironing out the worst bugs.
Beta release, is a software that has all functionality, which has been tested internally, but which needs some real world testing with users.

Then we have the whole "Release Candidate" debacle which appeared much later because of the frequent use of "beta" for what was actually alpha-releases.

Alpha - Untested not yet complete.
Beta - Untested complete.
Then 1.0 :)

Lately I've also thought about why Google has so much beta testing, but then I found out that the write in Python and then it all became clear. Python, as a type-unsafe-programming language requires E X T E N S I V E user testing to iron out the bugs.